New band of the day – Pins (No 1,248)

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Get out your Chelsea boots and anoraks – the C86 revival is upon us. Again
Hometown: Manchester.
The lineup: Faith Holgate (vocals, guitar), Lois McDonald (guitar), Anna Donigan (bass), and unknown drummer.
The background: There has been a lot of web blather about Pins already, and a lot of drama about which blog was going to be given the exclusive with regard to the Manchester band’s debut MP3. Basically, where 20 years ago Melody Maker, Sounds and NME would have duked it out to get the first Swervedriver or Ride front cover, now it’s DiS v Abeano v This Is Fake DIY or whoever. Plus ça change, and all that. The battle might be being fought on different soil, but the war remains the same, as does the soundtrack: Pins are exactly the sort of group the music papers would have been fighting more than 20 years ago.
Make that more than 25 years ago: they’re very C86, are Pins. They’re atypically Mancunian, that’s for sure. There are no forays into avant-funk or pop trance. If anything, if you heard them without knowing where they were from, you’d swear they were a Brooklyn band. They remind us of acts we featured a lot at New Band of the Day in 2008/9. All Velvets drones with a sprinkle of Spectoresque shimmer, they recall Crystal Stilts and Vivian Girls et al, with some of the dour exuberance – if you’ll pardon the paradox – of Best Coast, whom we believe Pins have opened for.
This is highly referential/reverential stuff from four girls who have clearly done their research. They haven’t delved too deeply into history: the look (pure Warhol’s Factory meets late-70s CBGBs/Bowery) is as obvious as the sound, with the usual signifiers of cool. There is only one track by them doing the rounds, and it’s as mired in the past as you’d expect, although as one blogger pointed out, it took Warpaint a while to reveal that they could stretch out and do other things beyond the bog-standard, to incorporate more experimental time signatures and krautrockier textures. Pins are brand new and just one track old, so let’s be patient. Yes, that track, Eleventh Hour, is the usual farrago of fuzz, echo, sustain, reverb and delay, the girls’ voices come as though from a dream, or a locked cupboard in a basement, and the players go bash bash bash, shambling at the limit of their abilities, non-musicians learning to play their instruments as they go. But who knows? In a year, they could have made their Fool and all the doubters will look like fools.
The buzz: “Girls will want to be them, boys will fancy them. In fact, girls will fancy them too and boys will also probably want to be them, so deadly is their concoction” – the Recommender.
The truth: They’re the most Brooklyn band ever to come from Manchester.
Most likely to: Step on.
Least likely to: Go freaky dancin’.
What to buy: Debut single Eleventh Hour is released on Haus of Pins in May.
File next to: Vivian Girls, Crystal Stilts, Dum Dum Girls, Warpaint.
Links: wearepins.co.uk.
Friday’s new band: SpaceGhostPurrp.
Pop and rockIndiePaul Lesterguardian.co.uk � 2012 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved. | Use of this content is subject to our Terms & Conditions | More Feeds
News from: Music: Pop and rock | guardian.co.uk
Original Post Link http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2012/apr/12/new-band-day-pins